What We Talk About When We Talk About Love Bugs

Phil adds his two cents--and a cautionary note--to the Linux community's conversation about the love bug virus.

While it is fun to pick on Microsoft
about the love bug virus, those of us in the Linux community should
ask ourselves: are we clean? The answer is: not at all. We are just
a combination of not having a high enough visibility and pure luck.
The visibility issue has to do with the fact that if you are going
to write a virus, then writing it for MS-Windows is the best
target. There are just more of those systems out there.

The other part of the story is that the average MS-Windows
user doesn't know what a computer is. The average MS-Windows user
just knows that he or she can write letters and, most importantly,
do e-mail. Their MS-Windows system is configured so that the type
of e-mail attachment is identified and the appropriate action is
taken. One choice may be to execute a program that is written, say,
in Visual Basic.

Now, let's say that Linux has won the desktop war, thus
making Linux the best (as in most popular) target for viruses. And,
just to make things a little better (or more portable), let's say
all those users have their systems configured so that attachments
in Java are executed automatically.

Would it take a lot of work to find everything that looked
like an e-mail address in the user's mail or Mail subdirectory? How
about removing all files in their home directory and subdirectories
that ended with .jpg and .gif? I think not.

We are being so smug talking about systems being secure
because we have user IDs and file permissions, because sendmail can
screen messages and so forth. Well, we can be secure, but at the
cost of making it harder for users to do their work. We could--and
probably should--make every user manually deal with attachments. We
could configure sendmail to screen incoming mail for various
patterns. We could do a lot of things.

Fundamentally, what happened with the love bug virus was that
MS-Windows systems were configured to offer insecure capabilities
to its users. Specifically, the ability to point and click to
execute code. If, even using the mime.types file, the average Linux
desktop was configured to execute a program (Java, Tcl, binary
...), the Linux system is in the same situation.

If Linux was the #1 desktop, then Linux would become the
optimal target for such a virus. Why write something that could
only attack 1% of the computers available when, with the same
effort, you could make it attack-capable on 90%?

We could brag about running as a user vs. root, but again,
that wasn't an issue. This virus looked in the user's address book
(something that Pine, Elm and Mutt all have) and deleted files in
the user's directory.

We are Linux people. If we succeed in world domination, we
will be the target. Clearly, it is time for us to work on some
innovation.